Last week in Zhongshan, China, Lexar invited a very small group of international press for a special preview of just a few of their upcoming releases. This event was held at the Longsys/Lexar/Foressee Headquarters which also houses the Lexar Memory Museum. To say that this facility is breathtaking is just a bit of an understatement as it is situated in the middle of what is promising to be one of the worlds largest technology parks.

The release was preceded by tours of the Lexar Memory Museum and Quality Lab where we learned that Lexar memory devices undergo extensive testing of over 1,100 products to ensure performance, quality, compatibility and reliability. The museum itself, however, houses some of the earliest and rarest forms of storage and would be an Apple, IBM or HP lovers dream tour. This…caught my eye however. They actually played it for us but, unfortunately, the video never recorded to our standard. I hadn’t a clue that the music recording industry existed before 1900.

LEXAR NVME GEN 4X4 M.2 2280 SSD

Transfer speed in storage memory is all the rage. The faster data can be moved the quicker a media job can be completed, or the more can be completed in a shorter time. Lexar demonstrated this first hand with their prototype Gen 4×4 NVMe SSD which was running at over 6GB/s for the demonstration.

Lexar is very excited about this SSD and hopes to see a 2020 Q2 release, believing that it can achieve 7GB/s read performance as they have already achieved that in prototype testing.

The Crystal Diskmark result was flat out impressive. This SSD supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol, features LDPC and will feature SSD Dashboard software management… but let’s not ask about specifics as to the controller just yet. All that we can state at this time is that it is a 12nm SSD controller and it isn’t from any of the big name manufacturers and it isn’t a Marvell product. The key question here might just be whether this controller will ever be seen outside of a Lexar product.

Apologies for the poor quality of this shot but IOMeter has shown that this SSD will break the 7GB/s threshold. They believe specs will be 7GB/s read and 4GB/s write, availability will be seen in 512GB. 1 and 2TB sizes, and that installed memory will be 96 layer 3D TLC flash.

This shot shows the system demonstration with a rather interesting shot of the technology park progress in the background. Check out Pg 2 for more…